Guest Post by Brian Viner: How teenage son was sucked into the terrifying Facebook drink craze

A few days ago, my 15‑year-old son Jake filmed himself mixing a cocktail in his own Wellington boot.
Those who saw his video on Facebook would have witnessed him adding cold baked beans, a raw egg and a third of a bottle of vodka, before mixing it together and knocking it back in one.


Welcome to the increasingly lethal world of Neknominate, which at the weekend claimed the lives of former grammar school boy Isaac Richardson, aged 20, and 29-year-old Stephen Brookes, from Cardiff. A week before it was linked to the death of two young men in Ireland.
The Neknominate craze has primarily spread on Facebook - where else? - like the deadliest of viruses.
The idea is that you film yourself drinking something horrible, then post the video online and nominate two friends to outdo you, giving them 24 or 48 hours to do so.
If anything, Neknominate acts as a further reminder that for all the advantages the internet has brought us, it also encourages intelligent people to do incredibly stupid and reckless things.
As a father of three, I find all this worrying in the extreme. Until last week I'd never heard of Neknominate, and certainly didn't know that my own son had partaken.
I was predictably horrified when I found out;. Jake had always seemed perfectly sensible about alcohol, and appeared to have taken to heart my warnings about teenagers drinking too much. So this seemed like a rare but spectacular transgression, terrifying proof of the dangers of social media.
I went to find him in his bedroom. 'Are you mad?' I exploded, having just seen the video. 'You could have killed yourself drinking something like that.'
His eyes filled with tears. 'I couldn't,' he said. 'It was just a joke. It wasn’t real.'

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Allowed to continue: Facebook say the game isn't breaking any of their rules

While my son at first appeared to be one of those reckless people who had succumbed to the siren call of online 'fun', I was relieved to discover that the Stolichnaya Russian Vodka he appeared to be downing was, in fact, just water. He can be pretty daft, but he's not that daft.
Sadly, one of his school friends mixed a different cocktail, containing cod liver oil, cat biscuits, ketchup and what appeared to be two shots of his own urine. He topped it up with beer and drank it down.
Thanks to Facebook, Neknominate is spreading beyond even immature youngsters. One of my friends, Rusty, a businessman in his mid-50s, shamefacedly told me this week that he'd taken part.

Far from being a bit of fun, the Neknominate craze is peer pressure of the most dangerous kind

He's a man with such a heightened sense of social responsibility that he spends a fortnight every year doing voluntary work in Africa.
But after receiving a Neknominate invitation from his 20-year-old daughter on Facebook, and wanting to show that he was game for a laugh, a dad for all seasons, he rose to the challenge.
He filled a pint glass with lager, cider, gin, milk, Marmite, salt and pepper and glugged it down for the amusement of his daughter and her friends, who later watched the footage online.
'Would I do it again now knowing that people have died?' he said yesterday. 'Probably not. I just thought it was a bit of fun.'
But far from being a bit of fun, the Neknominate craze is peer pressure of the most dangerous kind. If highly educated, worldly, middle-aged fathers can submit to it, then what hope gauche, impressionable teenagers trying desperately to gain credibility with their mates? 

What makes it so seductive, and so hard to stop in its tracks, is how it spreads like online wildfire.
Of course, one of the immutable facts of parenthood is that every father of teenagers has been a teenager himself. Even right into my 20s I sank the odd yard of ale, propelled not by extreme thirst but, yes, by extreme peer pressure.
But in my own teens and 20s I always drank in a social situation. The great paradox of social networking is that there is actually nothing sociable about it. Jake was on his own in the house when he decanted my vodka and filled up his welly.
And, unfortunately, just as the essence of the Neknominate game is for your nominees to go one step further, so must every generation outdo the one before.

The Facebook generation have a kind of ersatz independence that is intoxicating for them in more ways than one

I first heard about dares involving grotesque mixtures of alcohol from my older son Joe when he came home from parties telling us about the phenomenon of the 'dirty pint'. This was a pint glass filled with a combination of things from the food cupboard if you were lucky, from the drinks cabinet if you weren't.
My wife and I impressed upon him the terrible dangers of drinking mixtures of spirits, wine and beer. He indignantly told us that he would never be so stupid and would always refuse a dirty pint, no matter how much taunting might ensue.
But the 'dirty pint' challenge has now moved online, and that is what makes it so much more dangerous.